Peril

  “She’s probably gonna work here,” Jake said absently.

  “Doing what?”

  “Singer, I guess.”

  “No shit,” Mortimer said.

  Jake indicated Mortimer’s empty glass. “Another?”

  “Why not?”

  Jake poured the drink and Mortimer took a quick sip. “Is she any good, Abe’s girl?” he asked.

  “She ain’t bad. Coming in later tonight, Abe says. Gonna do a couple numbers.”

  Mortimer rolled the glass between his hands and watched the amber liquid slosh back and forth. He could feel the weight of the pistol in his jacket pocket. He knew it wasn’t much to offer, just a way for Abe to defend himself if some tough guy showed up and started throwing his weight around. You wave a gun in a guy’s face, and he cools down right away, starts figuring the odds, decides the guy holding the piece is one serious bastard, and that the lady in question is by no means worth taking a bullet for.

  And as for the piece, Mortimer thought, hell, he didn’t need it anyway. He wasn’t going to shoot anybody at this late date, and if somebody wanted to shoot him, so what? They’d shave off a few weeks at the most. And bad weeks at that. Hospital. Dottie fretting. Fuck it, Mortimer thought, now feeling oddly urgent about getting the gun to Abe before it was too late, doing just one good thing while he still could.

  He slid off the stool. “So Abe’s in back?” he said hastily.

  “Yeah,” Jake said dully. “Probably mooning over the broad.”

  Mortimer didn’t like Jake’s attitude, but what could you do with a guy like Jake, a dry kernel of a man, probably without a friend in the world. At least, Mortimer concluded, nobody could say that about him. Suddenly the pistol was like a gold watch after a long career, the physical proof that he had not lived in vain. After all, how many guys in New York City actually had an unregistered piece he could give to a friend? Not many, Mortimer told himself. You had to have lived a certain way to have an unregistered piece at your disposal. Thinking that, Mortimer abruptly decided that perhaps his life had always been headed for this moment, when he’d have a piece he could pass on, and touching it now, as he made his way toward the back of the bar, it felt like the one sweet fruit of a long, dry season.

  “Hey, Abe,” he said as he stepped into the office.

  Abe sat behind the desk, papers spread over it.

  “So, how you doing?” Mortimer asked.

  “Okay,” Abe said. He looked surprised to see him. “And you?”

  “Good,” Mortimer answered, amazed that it was the truth, that he actually felt okay despite the fact that the dark eddies of his last conversation with Stark continued to drift through his mind. But again, what was the worse Stark could do? Fire him? So what. Shoot him? Same answer. The good news about reaching the end of the line was that there just wasn’t all that much anyone could do to you.

  Okay, so nobody could really do anything to you, Mortimer concluded, but you could still do something for somebody. On the bounce of that notion, he stepped forward with a springiness that surprised him, took the pistol from his pocket, and placed it on the desk. “This is for you.”

  Abe looked at the gun as if it were a coiled rattler.

  “You said you could use a gun,” Mortimer reminded him. “So there it is.”

  Abe stared at the gun. “Morty . . . I didn’t really . . .”

  “My gift to you,” Mortimer said. “In case that fucking guy tries to muscle in on your girl.”

  “Morty, I don’t want a—”

  “I wouldn’t give it to nobody else, Abe,” Mortimer said quietly.

  “Yeah, but—” Suddenly Abe stopped, and Mortimer noticed a curious softening in his gaze, as if something had just come to him, a different take on things.

  “Yeah, okay,” Abe said quietly. “Thanks.” He gingerly reached for the pistol, like a guy picking up a scorpion, and put it in the top drawer of his desk. “Thanks again,” he said with a quick smile. “You’re a . . . a good friend, Morty.”

  Mortimer smiled brightly and sat down opposite Abe’s desk. “So, tell me about this woman, Abe. You didn’t tell me much last time.”

  “She’s nice,” Abe said.

  Mortimer waited for more, but when Abe kept the rest of it to himself, he said, “So, tell me about her.”

  Abe shrugged.

  Mortimer smiled. Abe was playing it close to the vest, but he could see that his friend wanted to spill it all, that he just needed a little encouragement. “Jake says she’s a singer.”

  “Yeah,” Abe said, adding nothing else.

  “Jake says you’re going to hire her,” Mortimer coaxed.

  “If she’ll take the job,” Abe said.

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “She’s got a few problems,” Abe answered with a slight shrug.

  “Like what?”

  “Left her husband,” Abe said hesitantly.

  “Plenty women do that,” Mortimer said in a worldly tone.

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t a clean break.”

  “How so?” Mortimer asked, happy that the conversation was going so smoothly now.

  “She’s sort of on the run,” Abe said darkly.

  “So the husband’s after her,” Mortimer said.

  “That’s what you’d think, right?” Abe answered. “But not in this case.”

  Mortimer smiled. Now he was getting to the true heart of it, to those little intimacies friends shared. “So, who she running from?” he asked.

  “Her father-in-law,” Abe said. “She’s pretty scared of him.”

  Mortimer watched Abe silently for a moment, a dark possibility suddenly sputtering to life. No way, he thought, no fucking way. Then he considered the fact that life had always managed to twist around and bite him in the ass. Take Cajun Spice, for example. What were the odds that fucking soap bar would surge ahead at the last minute, beat Lady Be Good, empty the coffers once again, leaving Dottie in the lurch?

  “So, when did she show up?” he asked tentatively. “This woman.”

  “Couple days ago,” Abe said. “She was staying at some hotel in Brooklyn, but I set her up in Lucille’s old place. I figured it’d be safer for her, you know?”

  Mortimer’s eyes fled to the wall calendar that hung to his right. “Lucille’s old place,” he whispered almost to himself. “Jane Street, right? I heard her say that once. Over a Chinese laundry.”

  Abe nodded. “Place was paid up to the end of the month.”

  “Jane Street,” Mortimer repeated softly.

  Abe looked at him quizzically. “You okay, Morty?”

  Mortimer nodded heavily, the full weight of what he’d feared now falling upon him. “This guy she’s running from. The father-in-law. She say who he was?”

  “No,” Abe answered. “She wants to keep me out of it.”

  Mortimer drew in a slow breath as he figured the odds that Abe’s girl was the one Leo Labriola was looking for. “Yeah, well, maybe you should do that, Abe,” he said cautiously. “I mean, it ain’t your business, right?”

  Abe looked surprised by the advice. “Of course it’s my business.”

  “Yeah, but a guy like that, dangerous . . .”

  Abe gave a theatrical wink. “So what if he’s dangerous? Thanks to you, I got a gun, remember?”

  Mortimer suddenly felt a slicing pain in his belly.

  “Morty?” Abe said. “You look a little—”

  “I’m fine,” Mortimer said quickly. He waited for the throbbing to pass, then got to his feet.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Abe asked.

  “Fine,” he repeated as he turned toward the door. Fucked again, he thought.

  SARA

  She’d decided on “Someone to Watch Over Me” as her final number, accompanying herself on Lucille’s piano as she rehearsed it by fingering the melody line, then sounding the appropriate chord. She couldn’t get the easy flow of Abe’s accompaniment that way, but she could at least make sure her voice hit the notes.
The fact that it had hit them, each and every one of them, gave her a measure of confidence that she could pull it off. After all, she didn’t have to do that much, she told herself, just stand in front of a few people, pretend she was an amateur, see what happened.

  She considered running through the songs again but decided not to. What if she didn’t do them as well this time, maybe missed a few notes. That would bring her down, make her less confident than she was at the moment. Besides, a singer could overrehearse. She’d learned that from the old singers she’d known the first time she’d come to New York. You could overrehearse and lose your energy, the fresh face of your act, get every detail of the routine so thoroughly nailed down that it left no room for you to let go, soar, spontaneously take the song to some new, surprising place.

  She glanced at the clock. It was three-thirty. Normally, she’d have had to start dinner now, along with finishing up whatever small chores she’d started during the day.

  She recalled how she’d made work for herself in the past, creating little jobs to fill her hours. Other wives used alcohol or the occasional affair, but she’d relied on a host of small projects to keep busy. She’d wash the Explorer or clean the pool or hose down the area around it. Tony would have been willing to hire someone to do such things, or even do them himself, but she’d never brought them up. She needed such petty tasks to keep her sane. They were what she did instead of drink or meet a guy at the local motel. For the rest, she’d relied on Della, the talks they’d had as they strolled the neighborhood streets or sat in Della’s kitchen, sipping coffee in the afternoon. It was the only thing she missed, a friend she could talk to.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  DELLA

  She jumped when the phone rang, and in that instant recognized how deeply it had sunk, the sense of dread that had settled upon her since talking to Tony. If it were Sara, she decided, she would tell her everything, warn her that the Old Man was looking for her, do whatever she had to do to protect her from him.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, babe.”

  The sound of Mike’s voice, so firm and familiar, filled her with joy, and she wanted only to know that he was safe and happy and would always, always, come home to her.

  “Mike,” she blurted out desperately, “are you okay?”

  “What?”

  She realized Mike had heard the frenzy in her voice.

  “What’s the matter, Della?”

  “Nothing, sweetheart. I was just thinking about you, that’s all.”

  “Thinking about me?”

  “Wondering how you were.”

  He laughed. “I’m fine.”

  “You’d tell me, right, if anything was wrong?”

  “Of course I would. Della?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything wrong on your end?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Everything’s perfect.”

  “Because you sound a little . . .”

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could we go out for pizza tonight? All of us?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Good.”

  “You’re sure everything’s okay?”

  She thought of what she’d done, how she’d talked to Tony, and how she’d tell Sara everything, too, if Sara called. She’d done her duty while at the same time trying to keep Mike and her children safe. A wave of high achievement washed over her, the sense of having looked danger in the eye, maybe even stared it down.

  “Everything’s perfect,” she said quietly. “It really is.”

  SARA

  The line was still busy. She returned the phone to its cradle, glanced toward the window, and reveled in the clear midafternoon air beyond it. She thought of going out, then the dread swept down around her, the fear he might be waiting for her out there, the Old Man or whoever he’d sent to do his work.

  But it was a fear she had to put behind her, she decided, and so she lifted her head as if on the shoulder of a bold resolve and headed for the door.

  Once outside, she turned right and walked to the corner, where she stopped, peered into the window of a florist shop, and thought of the roses Abe had brought to the apartment, a gesture so sweet, she thought now, that she’d felt herself crumble a little, some of the day’s panic fall away.

  “Nice flowers.”

  She jumped, then turned to face a small man in a worn suit, his features so dark and gloomy, his voice so oddly cold, she knew absolutely that he was Labriola’s man.

  “Nice flowers,” he repeated.

  She felt her body stiffen. “Yes.”

  “You like flowers?”

  She stepped back slightly, her attention entirely focused on the man who peered back at her from beneath the broad brim of a rumpled black hat, his face strikingly melancholy.

  “Yes,” she told him. “Yes, I do.”

  A thin smile glimmered on the man’s face briefly, then vanished. “Well, have a nice day,” he said.

  “Yes, you too,” Sara answered.

  The man touched the brim of his hat, then turned and headed in the opposite direction down the street, one shoulder lower than the other, as if bearing an invisible weight.

  Sara stood in place until he reached the far corner, then disappeared around it. She wanted to believe that the man was only a Village oddity, a sad figure in his dark suit, but not in the least connected to her or Labriola, just a strange little man, nothing more.

  Yes, she told herself, believe that.

  She continued on down the street, trying to get the little man in the rumpled hat out of her mind, but his face kept returning to her, superimposed over other faces, Caulfield, Labriola, men she’d fled, men bent on harming her.

  At the end of the block she stopped and glanced back down the street, half expecting to see the man in the rumpled hat lurching behind her, or quickly dodging behind a tree to conceal himself.

  But she saw no sign of him, no indication that he’d been anything but a sad-faced man who’d commented upon the flowers in the florist’s window. And yet she could not get his image out of her mind, the feeling that he had purposely approached her, as if to get a better look, then lumbered away to call whoever had hired him to find her.

  She looked down the street once more, then left and right along the side streets, then up ahead. Again she saw no sign of the man who’d approached her. But again she could not rid her mind of the dark suspicion that she had been found.

  CARUSO

  Labriola’s voice exploded through the phone. “Get over here!”

  “You mean—”

  “Right now!”

  “Okay, sure, I’ll—”

  Click.

  The phone felt like something stiff and dead in his hand.

  Shit, Caruso thought, fuck.

  He rushed to the car, Labriola’s voice still scraping across his mind, harsh and demanding as always but with something different in it this time, a voice that seemed on fire.

  The old neighborhood held its usual familiarity, mostly stubby brick buildings from before the war. He remembered playing stickball on these same streets, remembered the day his father had gone out for beer at that little deli right there, remembered watching him from that window, the one on the fourth floor, watching as he walked past the little store, checking his wallet as he turned the corner. He’d watched it for a long time after that, but his father had never come back around it again. What had he been? Four years old. And yet it was the one image that returned to him most often, his father, tall and lanky and always smiling and throwing him in the air, this man who seemed to hold eternity in his grasp, turning the corner as he thumbed the bills in his old brown wallet, head down, counting, with not so much as a quick glance back toward the little boy who watched him so adoringly from the fourth-floor window.

  If the guy had just hung around, Caruso thought now, then everything might have been different. He’d have had a father
and wouldn’t have had to hit the streets at thirteen, become a bagboy for Mr. Labriola, collecting his winnings, making his payoffs, greasing the palms he wanted greased, making the loans he okayed, chasing deadbeats, slapping them around a little when they didn’t pay—all of it done with a loyalty he couldn’t bring himself to question.

  He swung onto Flatbush Avenue, Labriola’s voice screaming in his ear at what seemed an even greater volume than on the phone, a voice so loud and raging that by the time Caruso brought the car to a halt behind the dark blue Lincoln, he could have sworn Labriola had actually cracked his skull and was stomping on his brain.

  Labriola jerked the door open as Caruso reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “Get in here,” he shrieked, then turned briskly and stormed back inside.

  The interior of the house swam in a murky light and had a dank smell, like brackish water. Labriola stood, naked from the waist up, at the center of the living room, his body so massive, so terribly there, everything around him seemed blurred and out of focus.

  Caruso stopped at the French doors that divided the room from the adjoining corridor and stood like a dog, awaiting some command.

  “What the fuck did you tell Tony?” Labriola demanded.

  “Me?” Caruso asked weakly.

  “Who else I’m talking to, Vinnie?”

  “I didn’t tell him nothing.”

  “You didn’t tell him nothing?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t tell him nothing, Vinnie?”

  “Nothing, I swear.”

  “I’m gonna ask you one more time. What the fuck did you tell Tony?”

  Caruso swallowed hard. “You mean about—”

  “The bitch!” Labriola screamed. “You told Tony I had somebody hunting down that fucking bitch wife of his, right?”

  Caruso shook his head. “No.”

  Labriola stared at him grimly, then abruptly turned to face the window, his hands behind his back, fingers entwined, the muscles of his arms and shoulders rippling wildly, as if small creatures were scurrying for cover beneath his skin.